The Dead Women of Juarez by Sam Hawken Read Free Book Online

The night was cold the way it always was, and the sky was stained an ugly color from the city lights. Away from the
turista
Juárez it was quieter and the shadows were deeper. Hardly anyone was on the streets and cars were rarer still.

TEN
    S HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT WITHOUT needing an alarm clock because it was Sunday morning and she always went to bed early on Saturday nights. This was her habit since she was a little girl, when her mother and grandmother were still alive and Sundays were the most important days.
    Estéban was asleep and wouldn’t wake until afternoon. Even if he hadn’t gone “shopping” the night before, he wouldn’t go to church. As soon as their mother died, Estéban abandoned the churchgoing habit and left it to Paloma to say prayers for both of them. He was like their father that way, and their grandfather, too, though at least he stayed and didn’t slip away to another town, into a bottle and then into oblivion.
    Estéban’s one concession to faith was a little statue of Jesús Malverde, the narco-saint, and a pair of Virgin Mary candles to go with it.
    Their house was small and old fashioned. Paloma had a white enamelware basin with blue flecks in her bedroom, which she filled from a matching pitcher. Soft light filtered through the yellowed drapes. Paloma removed her nightshirt and washed her body with a wet cloth.
    On Sundays she didn’t wear the post in her tongue. She put the barbell in a glass of water with a tablet that made the water fizzy and blue, as if she were cleaning dentures. She brushed and flossed and put on her best dark dress and made sure her hair looked right. Makeup was for other days, so she wore none.
    On Sundays Paloma didn’t drink coffee. When she left her room she prayed at a little shrine for Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. A replica of the icon hung from a wire and a nail in the corner. A low bench with a hand-stitched pillow for the knees had supported the women of their family on Sunday mornings for decades. Paloma recited the Glorious Mysteries with her mother’s black rosary.
    On Sundays she walked two miles to the church. She could have taken the car, but when she was a little girl the family owned no car and the walk was even longer. This she did, like so many other things, to remember her women by.
    The church was not the biggest in Ciudad Juárez, nor the richest. It was an old structure with deep roots, made from stone bricks and so traditional that it verged on the ugly. It centered a poor neighborhood of gathered homes and apartments, the streets crisscrossed overhead with thick tangles of electrical wire. Some roads were paved and others not. As Paloma walked, other pilgrims joined her. The church bells pealed.
    On Sundays she met with a dozen women, all older than she. Some could have been her mother and some her grandmother. To a woman they wore black: black dresses, black hats and black veils. They gathered near the open church doors in the bright morning, speaking to no one nor to one another. Each woman’s face was heavily lined from age, work and sorrow. The only time they smiled was when Paloma arrived and hugged each one of them in turn.
    On Sundays this church gave the Tridentine Mass. Other churches served their flock in Spanish, but here were the Latin words recited by a pair of ancient priests with hair the color of ash and snow.
    On Sundays Paloma sat with these old women and worshipped. She prayed fiercely, and when the time came for Remembrance of the Dead, she and the women linked hands and held tightly, as if the strength of their human chain was the only thing keeping them in the pew.
    The air grew warm and thickened with the mingled odor offlowers, incense and sweat. Lingering smoke drifted high in the vaults of the ugly old church, visible in the light coming through the upper windows. Sooty black stains remained on the stone where countless masses left their mark before.
    When the mass was finished, Paloma and the women filed out